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H
OLMES SLEPT IN THE
house again that Monday night, and locked in once more, although he did not know it. Miss Emily’s death had destroyed any theory I might have had about him, and I was confused and rather hopeless. Even granting that he could have escaped by the window, there was no possible way by which he could have reentered the house. Unless—and that came to me suddenly as I commenced to undress—he had dropped out the window, reentered by one of the long ladders we all have for tree pruning, and in the morning taken it away again.

Somewhere I had read that such a method had been used, and discovered by the marks left in the earth by the ladder. So, because I was not sleepy and because I could not hear Holmes snoring loudly in his comfortable guest room bed, I decided to go downstairs and investigate for myself. There seemed nothing else to do. Since the morning of the day before I had lost all contact with Herbert Dean.

Mother was tired, and after locking all her windows for her and placing a vase on each sill, “in case someone tries to enter,” as she said, I went downstairs and out the front, door.

It was another cloudy night, with another storm in the air but with no wind; which was fortunate, Mother having demanded our only flashlight and I being armed merely with a box of matches. I had lighted one and found no marks, and was stooping with my second one when a low voice suddenly said:

“Don’t be frightened, Miss Lou. It’s Dean. And put out that match. There’s nothing there. I’ve looked.”

The shock made me tremble violently, and I imagine he knew it, for he caught me by the arm and drew me away.

“Steady!” he said. “And where can we talk? The cellar?”

“The garage is all right,” I managed to say.

“Oh! Then Holmes is in the house again tonight?”

“Yes. How did you know he was, last night?”

“Knowing about Holmes is my business. Not for what you think, however. Your Holmes is a smart young man, as I believe I’ve said before. Some of these days he and I are going to have a good old-fashioned gam.”

“A gam?”

“A talk, a gossip. Whatever you like to call it. In the meantime, can’t we have one ourselves? I need to know a lot of things.”

This I agreed to and so I went back into the house, closed and bolted the front door, and on reaching the kitchen porch found him waiting for me on the back path. His matter-of-factness was solid and dependable. In silence he led the way to the garage, put me on a bench, sat down on the running board of the car and got out his pipe.

“Well!” he said at last, “things are getting interesting! Day by day, in every way, they’re getting hotter and hotter.”

That surprised me. “You’re hardly human, are you?” I said. “I believe you actually
like
this situation!”

“Human enough, but it’s my business,” he said calmly, and smoked thoughtfully and in silence for some time.

“I understand Helen broke up the meeting tonight,” he went on after the pause. “Very typical of Helen, if slightly indiscreet. Still she had a good enough reason, although I’d have kept her back if I’d known, but you see I’m not there any more. She’s filled up the place with servants, and I had to get out.”

“What was her reason? She was rather dreadful.”

“She was scared,” he said quietly. “You see, Jim owns a forty-five automatic. However, the police have the bullet now, and by tonight or tomorrow the experts will know that his pistol never fired that shot.”

He had little to say as to his own movements during the day, and he flatly refused to discuss the second glove.

“I’ll tell you all about that some day.”

But he was more concerned about Miss Emily’s murder than he had seemed at first.

“You see,” he said, “there can be only two or three reasons for killing her. First, that she was mistaken for someone else—possible, but unlikely to my mind. Again, she may have had to be put out of the way for some reason we don’t know; because she knew something or obstructed some plan. I have an increasing feeling that there is a plan. And still again, she may have had something in her possession which somebody else wanted or had to have. I say all this because we have to count out the usual motives of revenge or jealousy or love. She was hardly a person to inspire any of them. And of course there’s the possibility of a lunatic. We can’t eliminate that entirely.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you?”

“No. You see, Lou,—you don’t mind my calling you Lou, do you? it’s easier—you see there are two types of killers, roughly speaking. One is a low type, a subnormal mentally, who generally belongs to the underworld and who kills impulsively, out of fear or rage or liquor. The other type is the intelligent one. Its crimes are carefully planned and subtly carried out. But that of course is its great danger. Everything in such a plot depends on something else; it’s all fitted together like a machine. Then a cog slips and the whole business goes to pieces.”

“Does that mean that poor Emily Lancaster was such a cog?” I asked.

“It’s possible. Why else kill her? She was inoffensive, to say the least. If she knew anything she hadn’t told it, at least to the police. You see, Lou—I rather like calling you Lou. I hope you do too!—it’s my belief that somewhere buried in this Crescent is a story. I’m leaving the rest to the police and going after that story. But I don’t mind telling you that if and when I get it, it won’t be from the Crescent itself. Of all the tight-lipped mind-your-own-business people I’ve ever seen! But let’s forget them. Are you tired? Do you want to go in?”

“Not unless you do?”

“What, me? With a pretty girl and a summer night and a handsome running board to sit on? Never. Besides, it helps me to talk out loud. You’re a good listener, you know; any man prefers no voice even to a soft low voice in a woman at times.”

Then he dropped his bantering air.

“What gets me,” he said, “is why she left the house last night at all. It doesn’t fit, Lou. Why did Miss Emily get up, put on part of her clothing, eat an apple on the porch and then go out? She wasn’t scared off that porch. She’d have rushed into the house and locked the door. Unless,” he added, “she was afraid of someone in the house. And in that case, why the apple?”

He was annoyed, I could see. He had had a theory of some sort which had satisfied him, and then along came something, which, as he said, didn’t fit.

“One night she runs out of the house and hunts sanctuary at the Talbots’,” he went on, “and the next she sits on the back porch at one in the morning with that damned apple and then goes and takes a walk! Lou, we’ve got to find out why she took that walk.”

I thought for a moment.

“Of course,” I said, “she might have gone for the bird cage.”

“The what?”

“Well, Margaret had told her that the bird was dead, and about giving the cage to George Talbot to put in their stable. And she would know that he doesn’t lock the stable at night. He’s been hoping for years that someone would steal his car.”

He put his hands to his ears with a wild gesture.

“I look at you, Lou,” he said, “and you are uttering words in a very nice voice. But they don’t mean anything. What is this about a bird cage? Do you mean that Miss Emily Lancaster would go after it at one o’clock in the morning? Why would she do such a thing?”

“She was terribly fond of the bird. But of course she knew by that time that it was dead—You see, I really killed it. I put it in a back room and nobody gave it any water. I—I really can’t bear it, Mr. Dean. If she was after that cage when she was killed I’ll carry a scar all my life.”

Upon which, to my intense surprise, I found myself crying. I had been calm enough comparatively until then, and I think I scared Herbert Dean as much as I astonished him.

“Stop it, Lou,” he said sharply. “You’ve been a grand girl up to now, and this is no time to heat up and boil over. Stop it, do you hear? Of course you didn’t kill the fool bird, or Emily Lancaster either. Here’s a handkerchief. And this is a nice sentimental time, when you are softened with grief, to tell you that I’m often called Bert—or even Bertie! Silly name, but these things are like warts. You don’t know what brings them on. You only know you’ve got them.”

Which I dare say served its purpose of making me laugh, for it did.

He harked back to the bird cage almost at once, however, and so I told him the story. He listened until I had finished.

“Curious,” he said at last. “If Margaret told her about it she knew the bird was dead. Of course that might account for the spade too; that she meant to bury it. Still, to start out for a thing like that after her scare of the night before simply doesn’t make sense, unless the whole business was an excuse, a sort of camouflage. But that would mean—”

He rose rather suddenly and held out both hands to me.

“Up with you, my lady Lou. Poetry, did you notice! You are going into the house and to bed. I have an idea, although I can’t see you, that you look ghastly. And young ladies shouldn’t look ghastly, Lou. It isn’t becoming.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t cared much how I look. Not for years and years.”

He stood silent in the darkness, still holding my hands.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not. Why should you? The whole effect of this Crescent has been to defeat youth. That’s a rather terrible thing, Lou. And you submit. The difference between you and Helen lies right there, you know. You submit. She revolts. She has more courage.”

“Perhaps I want peace more than Helen does,” I said.

“Peace! It is only age that craves peace, Lou my dear. It has lived and so it is willing to rest. But why should you want peace? Conflict is the very essence of life. And speaking of conflict—” He released my hands.

“You’re going to bed,” he told me, “and I am going to the Talbot stable or garage or whatever it is, to look at that bird cage; although if anyone had told me a week ago that I would start with an axe murder and end with a bird cage I don’t know that I’d have believed them.”

He gave me a little shove and started toward the house.

“I’ll wait until you’re safely inside,” he said. “And listen to this, Lou. We may be through or we may not; but I want you to promise that you’ll not do any more night investigating. There are only two theories of these crimes: one is that they are inside crimes, done by someone on the Crescent; the other is an outsider and possibly a lunatic, and he’s not eliminated even yet. And I don’t know which is the worst. Let me do the dirty work. Is it a promise?”

“I thought you said I had no courage.”

“Moral courage, child. I haven’t a doubt you would fight your weight in wildcats, but there’s a difference.”

With that he let me go, and stood watching me until I was safely inside the house. Then he swung rapidly but silently toward the Talbot garage, and I turned to the front of the house and an experience which I still cannot remember without a shiver.

One of the strangest things during all those hectic days was the comparative immunity with which our killer apparently moved about among us. Police might be scattered here and there, and usually were; we ourselves might be on guard, our houses locked and our windows bolted. But with uncanny skill both were circumvented.

Thus, although I cannot say that our kitchen door was in full view from the garage that night, it was at least dangerously close to where Herbert Dean and I sat talking. Yet in that interval of a half hour or less what followed seemed to prove later that someone had crept up the steps of the back porch and slipped inside.

I had no idea of this, of course. I remember feeling happier than I had felt for a long time, in spite of our tragedies; feeling younger too, and determined to go upstairs and get the beauty sleep Herbert Dean had suggested that I needed. I think I was even humming a little under my breath as I went forward through the dark hall, although I stopped that at the foot of the stairs for fear of Mother.

I went up the stairs quietly for the same reason. There was a low light in the upper hall, but it only served to throw the shadows into relief, and it was while I stood at the top of the stairs that I thought I saw Holmes moving back in the guest room passage.

That puzzled me. He was locked in, or should have been, and after a moment’s hesitation I went down to the landing again and back along the hall. There I tried his door, but it was securely locked; and either he was asleep or he was giving an excellent imitation of it, from the sounds beyond.

I decided then that I had been mistaken, so I wandered to the end window of the guest room and glanced out at the Dalton house. Our hall was dark, but there was a light in Mrs. Dalton’s bedroom, and the shades were up so that I could see into the room.

She was there, and so far as I could make out she was walking the floor and crying. She was in her nightdress, and without her high heels she looked small and pathetic. Old, too; I had never thought of her before as an old woman. It came to me then that there was real tragedy in the picture framed by those windows, the tragedy of loneliness and some mysterious grief which was the more terrible because it was so silent and repressed.

But it seemed almost indecent to spy on her, and I was about to turn and leave when I heard something behind me. It was not a step; it was a stealthy movement, almost inaudible. And with that something or somebody caught me by the shoulder; I screamed, and that is all I remember.

When I came to Holmes was beating on his locked door and shouting murder, and I was absolutely alone in the dark and flat on the floor. Deadly sick at my stomach, too, and with a queer numb feeling in my head. Then I heard sibilant whispering, and I knew that Mary and Annie were on their staircase and afraid to come down.

“Mary!” I called. “Please come. It’s all right.”

My voice was feeble, but they heard it and slowly emerged. I must have looked a strange object lying there in the dark, and the noise Holmes was making did not lessen the excitement. With the lights on they gained some courage, however, and Annie roused Mother and told her I was half killed—which seemed to me to be the truth at that time.

The three of them got me to bed finally, and at last someone released an outraged and indignant Holmes and called the doctor.